


Stargazers

by ishouldwritethatdown



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Back to Earth, Canon Compliant, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Road Trips, Roommates, Stargazing, Vacation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-03-09 01:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13470996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: They all knew it wasn't going to be simple, going back to Earth. They couldn't just slip right back into their old lives. The world had spun on in the three years they'd been away - they're not the only ones who have changed since they stepped on board the Hephaestus. But they'll get there. They'll find a way to cope, like they always do. And even if they can't look at the stars quite the same way anymore, that's okay. That's what it means to be a survivor.





	1. First Thing's First

**Author's Note:**

> This story is going to recycle bits of the post-Hephaestus ficlets I wrote while the show was running - but now there's a coherent plot! Hooray!

“What now?”

They were all thinking it.

_What now?_

Minkowski took a deep breath. “Well. We can basically ask for whatever we want. I don’t think what’s left of Goddard Futuristics wants to piss us off any more than they already have. I’m thinking, we get a truck, load Hera on, get checked into an actual hospital, and then... And then we can figure out our next moves in the morning.”

She was so, soul-crushingly tired. She wished she could skip out on the hospital and just crash out on a motel bed somewhere, but she wanted Doug to get his arm looked at, and if he was doing that, he would make her get checked for the gutshot too.

Apparently he still wasn’t going to let her get away with stuff like that.

“Ask for one of the SI-5 ones with three seats in the front,“ Jacobi suggested. The rest of them were all in the Goddard-branded clothes they had on the ship, but he already looked like an ordinary person. After they’d got onto the Urania, he’d changed into scruffy jeans and a bomber jacket – something he owned, no doubt, for the name alone.

“What about you?” Minkowski frowned.

He sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “There’s a certain special something I’ve had my eye on for a while.”

\---

Minkowski was becoming increasingly aware that she knew nothing about technology.

The only member of the crew that knew anything about Hera’s specs was Hera, so downsizing her into what Renée could only describe as “eight big-ass hard drives” was no simple feat. Even if any of them had been comfortable with Pryce giving it a shot, she had been carted off by some out-of-his-depth Goddard crony already. They’d discussed it briefly, but none of them could think of a reason to keep her with them.

They all seemed nervous about them getting it wrong. Compression, from what she could gather, was a risky process. She’d already had to squash some systems when she transferred to the Urania – but that hadn’t been an issue, since she didn’t need to fly the Hephaestus any more, and those systems were redundant. The complications came when it was her personality core that needed squeezing.

“We won’t let anything happen to you,” Lovelace reassured her. Ever the level-headed Captain.

“I know. I trust you guys,” she’d replied.

Doug smiled, “See you on the other side.”

The compression took just over two hours, and about midway through Jacobi excused himself to go find his ride – he’d been hovering around for the first bit of the process, and although he acted like he didn’t care much about Hera, Renée suspected different. Even if it was just that she reminded him of Maxwell, he had wanted to make sure that she was alright.

They found their SI-5 truck (it looked like a Humvee crossed with a van in its goth phase) and loaded Hera on with care. Renée had not-so-politely rejected the assistance that one of the Goddard garage attendants offered. Lovelace picked the car apart until she found the two tracking devices in it. She got her Goddard jumpsuit covered in oil in the process, possibly on purpose.

Just when Renée was about to wonder aloud where the hell Jacobi had gotten to, she heard the rumbling of a motor and felt a deep dread settling in her bones.

“Oh, no,” Lovelace laughed.

Doug whistled as the wheels squeaked to a stop on the hangar floor. “I did not peg SI-5 for a patron of the hot pink motorcycle,” he commented, eyebrows raised, at the display before him.

“You look like a Ken doll,” Lovelace snickered.

Jacobi touched his heart, and with the most sincere gratitude said, “Thank you.” He killed the engine and swung his leg off the seat, admiring the bike as he did. “Yeah, we thought it probably belonged to some eccentric General from ages past who had it in their will that it would never be sold or repainted. Maxwell tried to steal it for my birthday once.”

“Are you coming with us, Jacobi?” Lovelace asked. She had her hand on the door of the Humvee. Minkowski couldn’t really tell if she meant it as an invitation, or a deterrent.

He shrugged, “I’ll catch up with you. There are a few errands I want to run here first.”

“How are you going to find us?” Minkowski asked, frowning.

Jacobi produced four black rectangles from his pocket and handed one to each of them. “Swiped some of the SI-5 phones. These things are on their own network.”

“They’ll be able to track us with these,” Lovelace said, turning hers in her hands.

“Nope. Management decided it was a security risk, so they’re only linked up to the SI servers with a special startup code. These ones are modded,” he held up the phone as if it demonstrated anything except a blank screen. “You guys can text me where you end up.”

“Okay then,” Minkowski nodded, taking another deep breath. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

When they got past all of Goddard’s security and onto the highway, Lovelace let out a “Whoo!” and attempted (unsuccessfully) to pump her arms into the air. “Freedom at last,” she sighed. She reached for the radio and some whiny white boy started cry-singing out of the stereo.

After a few seconds, Lovelace asked, “Did music get really bad in six years, or is that me?”

“Oh yeah,” Minkowski agreed. “It was already way downhill by 2012.”

“Oh, good,” Doug laughed. “It’s not just me. Maybe we can find a station with old music on it.” He started tapping around on the screen, a little clumsy but it was simple enough. He didn’t see any names he recognised – the only radio station he’d ever heard of was Big Red Wolf FM, which he had coined at some point after the first musical transmission from the star. Not that he had ever referred to anything at all with any consistency in his logs. He had a new name for everything each time he had turned the recorder on.

After a moment, Renée commented, “You know how to do that.”

He looked at her, and then to the radio with surprise. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the road, but she was watching him work with the screen from the corner of her eye. “Oh. Right. That’s cool. I guess I can add that to my new CV,” he joked, “’Can operate a radio’?”

“I was just thinking—“ Renée shook her head slightly, looking embarrassed. “I mean, maybe you’ll recognise some songs or something. Muscle memory covers a lot.”

“Sure,” he said, but he wasn’t sure it was convincing. He remembered asking Hera about the different components of human memory.

“Oh, I—I’m sorry, is it rude for me to treat you like a search engine?” he’d winced. He felt comfortable with Hera; it was easy to give in to. She assured him it was fine, but he didn’t want to take advantage.

She’d laughed, “No, Doug, it’s okay. Memory is split into two main functions; explicit and implicit. Implicit memory is stuff like talking, walking, any kind of unconscious learned behaviour. You still have all of that.”

“And explicit memory is…” he said slowly, “what I’ve lost?”

“Not exactly,” Hera replied. She seemed to be considering how best to explain it. “You haven’t lost all of it. Episodic memories, like people and events and places, that’s gone. But there are semantic memories that you still have. Not everything, just… a lot of stuff. Like… uhh, okay, so you don’t remember Star Wars, right? But you do know what a star is, and a spaceship. All of that’s semantic. Stuff about the world that you know.”

Operating a radio seemed procedural. The songs playing on that radio seemed semantic. Maybe every once in a while there would be a song he recollected, but that probably wasn’t going to trigger anything else. He was pretty sure that wasn’t how this worked.

After a while in the car, Lovelace piped up, “Hey, let’s play I Spy.”

“How do you play that?” Doug asked, scrunching his nose. He could almost remember, he thought. Something to do with colours, or…

“It’s easy, you just have to guess what I’m talking about. I spy with my little eye… something beginning with C,” she said.

“Uhhhh… car?” he guessed.

“Yep! Your turn.”

Renée rolled her eyes, “There’s a limited amount of things you can spy on an open stretch of road.”

“I spy with my little eye… something beginning with S,” Doug grinned.

“Sign?” Lovelace asked.

“Nope.”

“Sky.”

“Nope.”

“…Seat?”

“Nope.”

There were a few seconds of quiet while Lovelace thought and Doug grinned. Then Renée sighed, exacerbated, and said, “It’s ‘spoilsport’.”

“Yeah!” Doug congratulated, delighted, and Lovelace laughed. Renée tried to stop her smile, but it was contagious, and he saw her shoulders quivering with the laughter she was trying to suppress.

They gave up on the game, but a while later, Lovelace pointed out a sign by the road and said, “Hey, hey, Minkowski, pull in to the rest stop.”

“We’ve barely been driving an hour,” she replied, disapproving.

“I know, but c’mon… tell me you don’t want a cup of cheap-ass coffee right now,” she compelled.

Doug looked at Renée, and she seemed to battle with herself for a moment before turning in to the rest stop.

As the McDonalds came into sight, Lovelace groaned, “Oh, I really want a burger.”

“I want one too,” Doug said. He looked at Renée.

She caught his eyes after she’d successfully parked the car, and looked almost offended, “Do what you want! Make your first meal on Earth some artery-clogging garbage, I don’t own you.”

“You’re definitely going to regret that one,” Lovelace commented, but she was already climbing down, and Doug was shuffling out too.

“You’re not coming?” he asked, seeing her unmoved in the driver’s seat.

"My first cup of real coffee in three years isn't going to be takeout from some random rest stop. It's going to be home brewed, fresh, and in my favourite mug," she answered. The sharp edge in her tone and her hands stiff on the steering wheel told Doug that it was taking all her restraint not to climb out of the truck and get some garbage caffeine into her system.

“Okay,” he conceded, and shut the door with a smile.

Standing in front of the menu, he was overwhelmed with choice. “I have… no idea what I like.”

“Just pick anything. You can come back every day and get something different so you can figure it out.”

“Really?”

“No. Minkowski would kill you,” she said, deadpan. “Just go Big Mac. It’s a classic.”

“Alright,” he sighed. “Hey, I think… we should get something for Renée.”

“She didn’t want anything,” Lovelace said as she got in line.

“I know she said that, but I feel like once we’re back at the car with our food, she’ll feel different. I think I would.”

Lovelace was looking at him with something like suspicion. “You’re considerate, Doug.”

“Uhhh… Thank you?” he replied. Why did she make it sound like a bad thing?

“You really did have all that care and attention stored up inside of you,” she said bemusedly.

“What?”

She shook her head, smiling slightly. “Nothing. Just… you. Thinking about consequences and the future.”

He brought his shoulders up to his ears, and then dropped them. “It’s not like I have much of the past to think about,” he said.

“Fair enough,” she admitted, and then it was their turn to have their order taken.

They made their way back to the car with two burgers, two coffees, and an ice cream.

“I didn’t—“ Renée started to protest, flustered, but she accepted the cup anyway.

For a while, they were quiet, letting the mix of aromas fill up the cabin of the truck. Doug felt a Big Mac on his tongue for the first time, and couldn’t help thinking it was the best food he’d ever had.

“Is it just me, or does this coffee suck ass?” Lovelace asked suddenly.

“I told you,” Minkowski muttered, taking another spoon of her ice cream.

“I don’t think I have a great frame of reference,” Doug answered apologetically. It tasted fine to him.

"I think I remembered this wrong," Lovelace said, pulling a face – disgusted felt too strong a word, but Doug didn’t have a better one. "I'd been imagining tasting it again this whole time and it's just... not the same."

"Curse the rose-tinted goggles of nostalgia, right?" he offered. He was still basking in the flavours of the burger in his mouth. It was new, but it felt familiar at the same time. Not quite nostalgia, he didn’t think, but maybe the closest he could get.

"You're going to make yourself sick," Renée informed him as he took another bite. "You shouldn't be eating so much right away. The gravity adjustment is going to affect your stomach too."

"Shut up and eat your ice cream," he said. He was aggressively trying to ignore the churning feeling that was already starting in his stomach.

Renée sighed and fiddled with the flimsy plastic spoon sticking out of the cup. She looked to be contemplating something much deeper than an ice-cream.

Doug thought about saying something, but he couldn't find the words. What could he possibly say to make her feel better? Hey Renée, at least we didn't die horribly in a shuttle crash? Hey Renée, at least Goddard Futuristics hasn't sent the assassins after us yet? Hey Renée, at least only _most_ of my memories got obliterated by a horrendous brain-scan machine operated by people who wanted to enslave the human race? Hey Renée--

"At least we're alive."

Lovelace and Renée turned their heads to look at him from either side. Doug’s surprised expression matched their own; he hadn't realised he was speaking out loud. He started to apologise, but trailed off, staring at the coffee cup in his hand.

"At least we're alive," Lovelace agreed, turning back to stare out the windshield.

"Yeah. At least that," Renée said finally. Doug could feel her gaze on him for a few more moments before she looked away.

They finished the rest of their food in silence and then set off on the road again.

"So, how long til we get there?" Lovelace asked. She tried to sound casual.

Minkowski's glare told her it wasn't convincing. "Don't start that," she replied.

The washing machine feeling in Doug’s gut was getting steadily harder to ignore. "Uhhhhh, Renée?" he began, cringing, "I think you might have been right about eating too soon."

"God damnit, Eiffel, if you throw up in this truck I will leave your dumb ass by the side of the road," she answered.

She pulled over, and Lovelace opened the door in a hurry, shuffling out and pulling him with her. He managed to get clear of the truck before all the rose-tinted nostalgic flavours came pouring back out. Lovelace was definitely rolling her eyes, but she gathered up as much of his hair as she could and held it back.

"Hey, Doug?" Renée called through the window.

He gave a vague "mmhf" that could've been a "What?"

She grinned at him, "At least we're alive."

Judging by her laugh, "Fuck you, Renée," was exactly what she needed to hear.


	2. Sunset

Doug emptied his lungs in a long, continuous stream and closed his eyes. When he inhaled again, he could smell old gas that had leaked out of cars, and chlorine, and burnt plastic, and something leafy.

He knew these smells; he could identify them. He could even say they were motel smells. But he didn’t know Earth. Or, maybe he did. But he felt like all he had done was study it for a school project. Maybe he’d visited, once, got some field data. That was how it felt to be home.

The motel they’d checked in at matched the vague idea of a motel he had in his head. It wasn’t exactly a five-star suite, but he wasn’t complaining. None of them were; he supposed they were all happy to be home. He wasn’t sure what he was. Truth be told, he felt a little empty.

The last time he’d had his feet on solid ground before he joined the Hephaestus mission, he’d been in prison. He didn’t know how this was going to work. Goddard had supposedly waived the charges, but once Lovelace and Jacobi finished burning it to a crisp, what would happen next? What did he want to happen next?

“You okay over here?” Lovelace asked. She had her hands in her pockets, sauntering along like they weren’t all suffering gravity sickness.

“Yeah,” he sighed, though noncommittally. He looked at the pinks and yellows painted across the sky, and said, “I’ve never seen a sunset before.” He laughed as if he found it funny. “Isn’t that weird? I know exactly what a sunset looks like, but I have never seen one before today.”

Lovelace sat beside him on the bench and fixed her eyes in the same direction. He didn’t think she was going to say anything, but she suddenly added, “Me neither.”

He gave her a questioning frown, and she shrugged. “I have memories of sunsets. Watching the sun go down, listening to the heartbeat of a pretty girl. Watching the sun come up, sometimes, too. Or completely ignoring the movements of the sun, that was more common. But these eyes,” she put two fingers in front of them, “have never seen a sunset.”

“Huh,” he said simply. He wasn’t the only one that felt weird about being back. Or, being here for the first time, depending on how you looked at it. That was reassuring, he thought. Maybe. It was hard to puzzle out exactly what that was.

“Are you going to find a pretty girl to share the sunsets with again?” he asked. He meant it lightly enough, but when he saw the flicker of doubt on Lovelace’s face, he thought it might’ve been a mistake. “Sorry, I—“

“No, it’s fine,” she cut him off. She turned her eyes to his and smiled pensively, “Maybe I will.” She took a deep breath, looking away again, and exhaled loudly, “But first, vacation. I really, really need that vacation.”

“Right,” he smiled. “Any idea where you’re gonna go?”

She groaned, “Ugh, please don’t ask me anything else about the future. Immediate or distant. I think we better just… go one day at a time for now.”

“Right. Sorry,” he apologised. Had he said a single thing right during this conversation? He cringed, and decided it might be better if he just shut up. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, abandoning his resolve immediately and almost smacking himself in the face.

Lovelace chuckled. “It’s fine, Eiffel—ah, Doug. That’s going to take getting used to.”

He stoppered his speech before he apologised for the third time in a row. Renée kept saying he had to stop apologising for things that he had nothing to do with. Which, apparently, included everything Eiffel had done. He felt responsible, anyway. He thought he should feel responsible, at least for some of it.

“Doug?” Lovelace asked, breaking his train of thought before it crashed somewhere he didn’t want to go.

“Sorry—“ he stuttered, and it was out of his mouth before he could stop it. He rubbed his eyes and tried to bring himself back to where the conversation was before. He couldn’t remember.

“How’s your arm treating you?” she asked.

He held the sling into his line of sight and tilted his head to the side, bemused. “Is it weird that I’m happy about having my arm in a cast?” he asked.

She laughed. “You probably hardwired your brain to understand ‘broken arm’ as ‘time off work’. You skive.”

His eyebrows dropped in concentration. “Do I know that word?” He thought he could probably get it from context, anyway. But the gaps in his memories were all mysteries; either there used to be something there, or there didn’t, and he couldn’t tell the difference. He wasn’t sure what could be gained by puzzling it out, but he kept doing it.

“Probably not. It’s British,” Lovelace stretched her arms. “I only know it because I needed more ways to tease Lambert.”

He laughed, and looked again at the sky. It was dimming now, starting to wash over with royal blue from the east. “Is dinner the future, or can we talk about that?” he asked.

“Psh,” she pushed his shoulder with roughly an eighteenth of the strength he was sure she had. “We’re gonna order pizza. Then we’ll really be back on Earth.”

\---

“I’m limiting you to one slice of each,” Renée told him sternly, gesturing towards the four pizzas. “You’ve already thrown up once today.”

He made a face, “But first pizza night on Earth!”

“Yeah, and you want to enjoy it, right?” she argued. “You get a slice of each pizza! That’s—you get to experience the whole thing!”

“What about garlic bread?”

“…You can have ONE piece of garlic bread.”

The distressed noise he made was, possibly, the most upset she had ever heard him about anything. Yeah, he was Doug Eiffel alright.

“That’s cruel, Minkowski,” Lovelace admitted. She was cross-legged on one of the twin beds, already started on her first slice, and clearly finding the whole argument quite amusing.

“You’re not sharing a room with him. You don’t have to deal with lingering barf smell,” she jibed.

Lovelace conceded with a shrug and took another bite of her pizza.

The debate was cut short by the rumble of a motorbike engine outside the door. Renée was about to get up to open the door for Jacobi, but it opened in a dramatic swing before she got to her feet. Jacobi was pressing on the handle with one hand while the other stretched into the air. With flair, he announced, “Fear not, my faithful companions, I have returned.”

With a suppressed laugh, Lovelace asked, “What would you have done if this wasn’t our room?”

He adopted a deadly serious expression and answered, “No witnesses.” Then he launched himself onto the open space on the bed with a gleeful “Whee!” and somehow ended up half-vaulting into a cross-legged position to match Lovelace’s. He reached for a piece of meat feast pizza.

“What’s in the backpack?” Doug inquired, and Jacobi pumped his eyebrows, doing his not-quite smirk.

“Goodies,” he answered, finishing his mouthful and then swinging the backpack off his shoulder. He yanked on the zipper and revealed what appeared to be a large collection of brightly-coloured garbage.

Doug gasped in wonder, and Renée was forced to look a little closer; it was candy. A whole backpack full of the sugariest candy Jacobi could get his hands on.

“Absolutely not,” she said immediately, pointing at Doug’s hopeful expression.

“Awwww,” he pouted.

“She’s not the boss of you,” Jacobi scoffed, “Stuff your face.”

“You did say…” Lovelace reminded her in a low I-told-you-so voice.

“Shut up,” Minkowski scowled, and Lovelace chuckled.

There was a bright flash that startled them all, except for Jacobi, who was the one holding the camera.

“What the—why do you have that?” Minkowski asked. It was one of those wind-up disposable ones. She could only assume that he had produced from among the garbage in his backpack.

“It’s like a vacation,” he said vaguely. “We can capture all these fun memories we’re making.”

“You have a phone,” Doug pointed out.

“I also have a camera,” he countered, and wound up the switch again. He turned the camera around and made a cheesy smile and threw up a peace sign. After the camera flashed, he blinked a couple of times and said, “I think I’m going to take up scrapbooking.”

It was impossible to tell how serious he was being at any given moment.

“So, are we making a pillow fort later?” he asked, as if it had been on everyone’s minds.

“Oh my God,” Doug’s eyes sparkled as he whispered, “Yes.”

Renée just wanted a quiet first night back on Earth, but she was with her crew, and of course they were never going to let that happen. At some point, Doug had got it into his head that they needed to be covert about transporting all the bedding and two chairs from Lovelace and Jacobi’s room into Minkowski and Eiffel’s, which just resulted in a bad ninja impression and some very loud shushing and giggling.

They managed to make a den in between the two beds, using the tall-backed chairs as supports and two duvets draped between them. The pillows were piled onto the floor, and then all of them climbed in. There was barely any elbow room.

Jacobi’s camera flashed and they all groaned.

“Do you guys want to play truth or dare?”

A unanimous and simultaneous “NO” was the response.

He shrugged and rummaged around in his seemingly neverending backpack. He didn’t say what he was looking for, but he suddenly exclaimed “Oh!” and produced a packet of cheap felt tip pens. “Hey Eiffel, we all need to sign your cast.”

“Oh, right,” Doug said. Renée wasn’t sure he was aware of the tradition, but he took his arm out of the sling and presented it to Jacobi for signature nonetheless.

He scribbled something in green, and then passed the packet of pens to Lovelace. She chose an orange pen and doodled a monkey and her name before passing it on to Minkowski.

Doug had to lean across the fort for her to reach, but she took hold of a red pen and poised it, ready for some witty message. She felt like they were all watching. What the hell could she write?

She looked at Jacobi’s message; “Don’t think about how much this itches! Love, Dan Dan   
the Explosions Man”

She pressed the pen against the plaster before she changed her mind and wrote, “Break a leg! –Renée”

Doug took back his arm and read their messages, laughing softly at each one. He looked so happy, just then, and it filled her up with something warm. This could work. It would. This new, messy, Earth version of them.

In a pillow fort, in a crummy motel in Raleigh, Renée watched Jacobi snap a photo of Doug’s newly decorated cast with his camera, and she realised that she was already halfway home.

\---

Lovelace couldn’t sleep.

She’d hoped that when they were off the Hephaestus, she would be able to sleep. But she’d just been kept awake by the echoes of her own words and the nagging reminder that this was the second time she was flying away from the Hephaestus station. Only this time, if she got turned around, there was nothing to go back to. No plan to be made.

She knew that was stupid. She had never been Earthward bound on the U.S.S. Horrible Unending Nightmare.

It struck her that she was the only one that was going to call it that, now. Eiffel’s nickname for the shuttle hadn’t caught on with the others, but she’d liked it. It was apt, she remembered thinking.

She’d hoped that once she was back on Earth, with real gravity and a real bed, that the insomnia might finally ease a little. But it turned out, while spaceships were haunted by all the people she didn’t save, Earth was haunted by her own ghost.

She could remember driving down streets like the ones they’d taken. She remembered ordering a pizza feast and getting too much candy from the corner store. She remembered looking at sunsets with pretty girls.

She had all these memories, the memories of the old Isabel Lovelace. Someone who she wasn’t any more.

She was the opposite of Doug, she realised. Old memories, new body. Old body, new memories. They were quite a pair.

“Lovelace, I can drive,” Minkowski had insisted.

“You’ve been driving all day. You only just got your wound redressed. Take a break,” she’d asserted.

It had taken about two minutes for Minkowski to regret backing down on this issue.

“Oh my God, watch it!” she’d yelled as Lovelace took a corner a little too fast.

“I was going to miss the turn!” she argued.

“Just—pull over, let me drive again, I can—“

“No, I’m doing it. It’s like fifteen minutes.”

“Lovelace—“

“I’ve got it, Minkowski.”

Doug had the map open on his phone, and about five minutes later, he pointed at a passing junction and said, “I think that was it,” somewhat meekly.

“Goddamn it—hold on,” she said.

“Wh—no, no, no, no—“

Eiffel had screamed rather melodramatically when she made a U-turn over the road, using the nearly empty bus lanes – “nearly” being key. As a frustrated driver honked their horn, Doug yelled, “You _flew_ a _spaceship_! How can you be so bad at this?!”

“Shut up, Eiffel!” she’d returned.

“Lovelace, let me drive,” Minkowski commanded.

Neither of them got another word in, because their arguments overlapped each other incomprehensibly, raising in volume until—

“WHY DON’T I JUST DRIVE?” Eiffel suggested, loudly, to the effect of quieting the other occupants of the car.

No-one said anything for a good few seconds. Lovelace pulled into a parking lot and took her hands off the wheel, staring right ahead. Minkowski was doing the same. Eiffel was looking between them, expecting an answer.

“Minkowski, swap sides,” Lovelace said finally, the words hitting the air like an anechoic chamber.

They swapped. None of them spoke until they got to the motel, and once they booked their rooms, Doug had sat on a bench on his own for a while.

She’d meant to talk to Minkowski, but she couldn’t find the right words, so they just ended up existing near each other. All things considered, that wasn’t too bad.

Lovelace rolled over in her bed with a sigh, and was met with the silhouette of one Daniel Jacobi, on his side, one hand on his hip.

“Draw me like one of your French girls,” he whispered.

Lovelace couldn’t help it; she burst into laughter.


	3. Home Again

“Are you ready?” Doug asked. He was only asking because he knew she wasn’t.

Renée blew a long breath out of her mouth and shook her hands out instead of answering.

He took her right hand with his left – the one that wasn’t strapped in a sling. Her hand was clammy, and he thought for a split second that he could feel it trembling. “Hey,” he said, softly. “You got this. You’re a total badass.”

Her face split into a terrified grin. “You keep saying that.”

“Keeps being true,” he replied, although he couldn’t remember saying it before, and that felt weird.

“This can’t possibly go wrong,” Lovelace added, from where she was leaning on the   
Humvee. “Nothing in our lives ever does.” She looked much more comfortable in jeans and a plain tshirt than she had been in a Goddard jumpsuit, but Doug couldn’t understand how she wasn’t freezing.

Apparently, that had been what Renée needed to hear. She nodded and took another deep breath. “Okay. Let’s do this.” She held tight to Doug’s hand, but she led the way up the path to the front door. Up the ramp, and onto the doorstep.

“Hey, say cheese!” Jacobi exclaimed, and the camera flashed at them all, caught off guard.

“Dude!” Doug blinked.

He held up a hand in surrender. “I’m gonna be a clickbait writer. Thought I might as well get started on my material. Ten photos taken right before disaster, etcetera.”

Lovelace rolled her eyes, “Don’t listen to him, Minkowski.”

“Never do,” she joked, and Jacobi snorted.

Renée squeezed Doug’s hand and let it go. She reached for the doorbell and he heard it ring inside the house. When she took her hand back down, it met her other one and she fiddled with the ring on her finger.

Doug felt like a spectator. He wasn’t a part of this event, just watching, and he wished so badly that he could take the look of absolute terror that was on Renée’s face away. He thought about taking her hand again, but he knew he shouldn’t.

A silent eternity passed before the door swung open. Renée and the person at the door stared at each other for a few seconds before things started to happen.

“Kateřina?” Renée said.

“Renée,” Kateřina breathed.

There was another beat, and then Kateřina had her arms around Renée. She looked a little taken aback, but she returned the hug – albeit with a little less vigour.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Kateřina said. Her words were catching a little, and when she next spoke, tears started rolling down her cheeks. “We thought you were gone, I—Oh my God, I’ll go get Dom, wait, wait here-!” She tore away and skidded down the hallway in her socks, around the corner. Doug could still hear her when she yelled, “Dominik!” inside the house.

Renée glanced at Doug’s confused expression, and she looked like she was about to explain, but then they heard the sound of someone returning to the front door.

First, Doug heard the rattle of the wheels on Dominik’s chair, and then he saw the exact mirror of tight-chested apprehension and wide-eyed hope that he could see on Renée’s face.

Those two expressions reflected back on each other, and then they were washed away by the most ecstatic joy he’d ever seen. Renée made some kind of noise and then practically did a knee-slide into his arms.

He squeaked something in Polish, sniffing and holding her tighter.

There was something between a laugh and a sob, and then her reply.

“How are you—No, you can explain it later. Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re here.”

When Dominik opened his eyes, they landed first on Doug’s smile, and then travelled to Lovelace and Jacobi. He sniffed again and pulled away, but kept his hands firmly on Renée’s shoulders. “Who’s this?” he asked her.

“Right,” Renée nodded and wiped at her eyes, turning back around. “Dominik, this is Doug Eiffel, my First Officer.” She pointed next to Lovelace, “Captain Isabel Lovelace, my, uh, second in command. And, um. Jacobi.”

“Just… Jacobi?” Dominik asked.

“I’m not just anything,” he quipped, and Lovelace elbowed him. “Ow!”

“And Hera’s in the car,” Renée added. “She’s the mother program from the Hephaestus.”

“Okay…” Dominik said slowly, taking them all in. “Oh, uh, this is Kateřina, my sister.” He gestured behind him at Kateřina, who gave a small wave and a smile. Her cheeks were still stained with happy tears.

Dominik took hold of his wheels and said awkwardly, “The house is a mess, but uh, come in. Come in.”

“Don’t worry,” Doug told him, as he stepped over the threshold, “I have literally no standards.”

Lovelace laughed, but Renée looked too inside-her-own-head to hear him.

Dominik’s living room was modest and tidy. The far wall was completely covered in bookshelves. Somehow, they managed to look like soldiers in a line.

“Coffee?” Dominik offered.

Renée closed her eyes blissfully and said, “Oh, God, yes.”

Doug hadn’t been sure what to call Dominik’s expression before he was shown its antecedent; he’d looked lost, and now he was finding his footing, a smile on his face. Like he was getting back into a routine, reuniting with a familiar feeling.

“Okay,” he said, before turning his eyes to Doug and the others.

“Lots of milk and sugar, please,” he answered.

“Uh, you know,” Lovelace flicked a quick glance at Jacobi, “I think it would be a good idea to get Hera inside.”

“Right,” Jacobi jumped in immediately. “Yeah. Is there somewhere we can put eight processors for now?”

“Sure,” Dominik said, although he looked a little taken aback, “uh, in the office, I guess. On the left.”

“I’ll get the coffee,” Kateřina said quietly, and slipped out of the room after them.

Ah.

Doug was left sucking on his teeth, racking his brain. He was sure, in his youth, that he’d been an expert at truancy. He just seemed like that sort of person. He was also fairly sure that “how to come up with a good excuse” was not knowledge that should have been erased in the wipe, and yet here he was, sweating in silence.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” he blurted, and left the room without asking where it was or looking at Renée and Dominik’s faces at all. His cheeks burned, and he hovered in the hallway with his back against the wall, out of sight. He closed his eyes, and tried to release the air in his lungs as quietly as possible.

“Are you okay, Renée?” he heard Dominik ask. It was a careful question, aware that it could open a floodgate that needed to stay closed, but there was a necessity in it. It was a hand offered to someone you weren’t sure was able to swim.

A sigh was the response, and then a gentle hum. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m going to be.”

Doug pushed off the wall and peeked in the next door. It was the kitchen, and Kateřina was rifling through the cupboards with a frown. He was going to move on, actually find the bathroom, but he changed his mind.

“Do you need help with anything?” he asked from the doorway.

“Oh, um…” Kateřina glanced at him, but was engrossed in her task. “That’s alright, I… _hovno_.” She took her hands from the cupboard and crossed one over her abdomen while the other rested on her face. She looked like she was trying to figure out a puzzle.

“Are you playing Tetris over there, or something?” he joked, walking further into the room. It looked like a perfectly normal mug cupboard to him, although it might’ve been colourful enough to be Tetris.

He tried to remember playing Tetris for a moment, but he knew immediately that there was no point. He tried to suppress the sudden impulse he had to find a Tetris game and play it.

“I can’t find Renée’s mug. I think it’s… upstairs. In the attic. I’ll have to go find it,” she said. She had her face scrunched up, as if she should have known that Renée was going to come home, that she was going to need her mug from where it had been stashed after she died three years ago.

“Do you want me to come help?” he asked.

She looked doubtfully at his broken arm, but said, “Yeah, okay.”

She led the way into the hallway and reached up to a hatch in the roof. She tugged on the handle, and then took hold of the first rung of the ladder and pulled it down. She glanced at him again before starting to climb the ladder, and said, “It was Doug, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he smiled.

“What did you do, Doug?” she asked. Her head had disappeared up the hatch, and she seemed to grope around for a few seconds before the light flickered on.

“Communications,” he answered with a nod, hoping that she wouldn’t ask too much about it. He could remember looking at the comms panel blankly, unsure where to put his hands first. Hera gave him a first step, and then suddenly he was flicking switches and checking displays without knowing what they meant. He’d held his hands in front of him like they didn’t belong to him, because they didn’t. Renée had offered to make contact with Canaveral instead.

“Did you talk to any aliens?” she chuckled, and took another few steps up.

He just laughed. It was sort of a strained sound, but she didn’t seem to notice. The musty attic smell hit him then, a cool waft of air carrying memories he didn’t have. Had he ever had an attic? Had he ever slipped from a rung and tumbled to the floor, in a fit of swears or giggles or both?

There were nicks and scratches and little pale protrusions all over his body that he didn’t know how he got. Some of them were recent, evidence of his clumsiness on the Hephaestus, and others looked older. The x-ray on his arm betrayed an old break that had healed slightly skewed when he had used his hand too much and too soon.

He shuffled his shoulders. He knew what this meant to him, the attic smell and the person whose mug he was helping to hunt for. Knew it like the back of his hand.

\---

Hera had had a lot of new homes, recently. Feeling her way around this one was the weirdest yet.

The Hephaestus had been shambling and difficult to organise. It was clunky, and grumpy, and tended to snap back. It didn’t help, either, that for the first year of the mission there were entire sections of the station that she had no means of taking into account.

But the Hephaestus had been home, for a while, and she’d made her peace with it being her home forever. And then, of course, it wasn’t. Seeing the Hephaestus go into the star made her feel all sorts of things that she hadn’t managed to put into boxes yet.

The Sol was a luxury penthouse. Spacious, and stylish, and ready to meet her every need. It had also been too good to be true.

And then the Urania, which was cramped and not designed for her. She felt naked in there, stripped of all her admin access. A passenger. But, it had been bearable. She’d known that it had an end, and she had people to talk to in the meantime. People to get to know.

The Minkowski-Koudelka house was the unpredictable one. It wasn’t built for her, but it didn’t house her badly. Once the crew had figured out how to hook her up to a cloud system, she could be anywhere the wifi could reach. In the SI-5 phones Jacobi had stolen, or the TV, or the thermostat.

All in all, it wasn’t too different. She had less eyes, for the time being, and her ears tended to pick up scratchy audio. She didn’t have her own sensors for the weather outside, and the air in the house didn’t move in the same way it did on the station. But these were all things she could deal with. Because she was finally free.

_Free_. A weird word. Maybe not the right one. Since forever, free meant “out of Goddard Futuristics”. But now her circumstances were different, and maybe the word was too.

“Hera? Can you… hear me?”

He asked it in the same way. The same lilt of the voice, that curious twang, before she always said, “Yes, Officer Eiffel, what can I help you with?” with a glitch in her voicebox.

She didn’t say that this time. Different circumstances. Different question.

“Loud and clear, Doug,” she responded. No blips to be heard. Free.


	4. Far Far Away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featuring headcanons by @bikerideoceanside on tumblr!!

Lovelace had been trying to watch Jacobi out of the corner of her eye for forty minutes before he exclaimed, “Oh, what!” in an exasperated tone.

“Sorry, it’s… nothing,” Lovelace averted her eyes and leaned forward, resting her forearms on her legs.

“Out with it,” he demanded flatly. He put his coke down on the table decisively and stared at her. He may not exactly have been Mr. Emotional Honesty, but this concerned him in some way, and damn if he didn’t want to know what everyone said about him behind his back.

He wasn’t part of the Hephaestus Crew. He was the interloper, the sort-of asset, the variable. They didn’t like him; he didn’t care. He didn’t want to be part of their little troupe. The only reason he’d helped them was because they were the ones getting off that station. They were a necessary means to an end.

He was better off by himself, anyway.

“You don’t have to do all this,” Lovelace said, turning her head back to him. She gestured. “I could have… found my own way to the airport. You didn’t have to…”

But.

This was the thing. He didn’t want to be by himself. Not anymore. The thought of striking out by himself scared him more than it had in the past, more than it should have. More than he could admit.

“I can go,” he said, while his useless brain screamed at him. _No! No! No!_ He started to get up.

“No,” Lovelace put her forearm against his to stop him from moving. She sounded frustrated, like either she wasn’t explaining it right or he was being a dumbass. He didn’t finish weighing those possibilities before she elaborated, “No, I mean. If you want to stay, you don’t have to prove that you’re _useful_. You can just… ask.”

He dropped his eyes and brought his hands together. He ran his fingers over the metal knuckles of his left hand. “I can make my own way,” he said.

“Point is you don’t have to,” Lovelace said, like the concluding sentence of an argument. She didn’t particularly expect a response, he felt.

“Are you inviting me to ruin your vacation?” he asked, cracking a grin. “Because it feels like you’re inviting me to ruin your vacation.”

Her response was half a laugh and a shrug. “Do your worst, Jacobi. I’m going to enjoy this vacation if it kills me.”

They didn’t talk much while waiting for boarding. It was easy to be quiet around Lovelace, now that she wasn’t bursting to say something. He was trying to see if he could beat his old high score at Z-Type on his new phone; it took him a while to get the hang of it again, but soon his thumb was darting across the screen with as much accuracy as he’d ever had.

It was good to get his mind off things. Just let the letters fill up his entire brain. Demolishing spaceships with a few taps on the screen. He was good at destroying things. He tried not to wonder if he would ever stop.

He kept looking around the cabin on the plane once they were on it. Meticulously mapping its layout, and assessing all the people around him. His leg was bouncing up and down.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lovelace asked, flicking a glance up and down him. Not in rhythm with his leg – the movement stuttered and started again.

 _Shut up_ , he commanded his brain, somewhat directionlessly. Stupid leg. Stupid rhythm.

He forgot to answer the question. Lovelace stared at him for a few seconds, and then observed, “You have a thing with planes.”

He resisted the urge to tell her to shut up, but his next immediate came tumbling out unimpeded in its place: “You make it sound like I regularly seduce aircraft.”

“No I don’t,” she responded flatly. “No one else thinks that’s what it sounds like.”

In the aisle, there was a middle aged man wrestling with his luggage and the overhead locker. His shirt was riding up, and he was trying to fix that at the same time. He looked very frustrated with himself and the universe in general. Several of the other passengers around him were watching what was happening with a sort of sad pity, and offering no help whatsoever. He chided their inaction before realising he was doing the same thing.

He bit on his tongue and scrunched his forehead. After a second of staying like that, motionless, he got up and shoved some of the luggage in the overhead to the side so that the man could fit his in. The man looked at Jacobi in surprise, and he didn’t manage to get a thank you out before Jacobi turned and walked back to his seat.

Lovelace was watching him the whole time. “What was that about?” she asked when he sat down.

“I have no idea why I do anything,” he answered.

Lovelace shrugged and pulled her hand luggage out from under the seat. “Alright, weirdo.”

He was used to needing escape routes. Quick way out in case something explodes. And there were emergency exits on planes, sure, but with every passing second that exit changed location. His brain kept working overtime, like a GPS constantly recalculating. Window seats made it worse, that was why he insisted on sitting aisleside.

He plugged in his music and tried to forget where he was. Four and a half hours. He could survive for four and a half hours.

“Do you have a piece of string?” he asked Lovelace suddenly.

She looked up from her puzzle book. “Uhh… no?” she answered, frowning. She looked like she was trying to figure out what he needed it for.

It was probably in poor taste to make a joke about building a bomb, right?

He thought for a moment, and then started unlacing his shoe. He was halfway through doing it before figuring out that it would have been easier to use his other shoe, because then his left hand could get at it better. Goddard had designed it for precise movements, after all.

He was never going to be totally free of reminders, was he?

When he’d freed his lace, he tied the ends together and started weaving it in and out of his fingers. The knot made it difficult, and it was a little shorter than he was used to, but he could remember all the steps. He held it up to Lovelace and announced, “Cat’s cradle.”

“You know a lot of those?” Lovelace asked. “I could do a couple when I was a kid. Uhh… Jason’s ladder?”

Jacobi untangled himself and started over until he had Jacob’s ladder between his hands. “I learned a bunch of them to get used to my hand.” He wiggled his fingers. “They’re relaxing.”

She was looking at his hands. She just said, “Drills.”

It wasn’t a complete thought, and not one he thought she intended to finish out loud, but he understood what she meant. Drills. Be there at this time. Do it this way. Creative flair strongly discouraged.

He hated the military. But the regimen was relaxing. Orders replace thoughts. Protocol prevents mistakes.

Usually. Sometimes.

He rearranged the string on his fingers and made the running dog. Four more hours with his thoughts. He started relacing his shoe.

\---

Sand was the first sensation that really made Lovelace realise she was back on Earth. The way it shifted under her feet felt irregular after the hard metal station, hard linoleum floor, hard tarmac roads. This was an Earth feeling.

She kicked off her shoes and peeled her socks off her feet, and then dug her toes into the sand. It was cool, the warmth all having seeped out into the dark. The sun had dipped below the horizon an hour ago, and the only light being cast across the beach now was from the towering buildings glowing yellow in the distance, and the white sliver of a moon.

“Do you dare me to jump in the ocean?” Jacobi asked.

“I absolutely do not,” Lovelace responded.

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” he grinned, and stripped his shirt off.

“Don’t,” she said. She sat down in the sand. She wasn’t going to stop him.

He ran towards the water, and she sighed. He took a running leap and cannonballed into the shallows, which she wasn’t sure would be particularly satisfying. When he resurfaced, he threw his arms up and yelled, “Woo!”

“You’re an idiot!” she shouted.

He stood up and shook his head, and the beads of water caught the light as they flew off his hair. “S’cold,” he reported, making his way back up the beach.

“No shit,” she rolled her eyes and tossed him one of the towels she’d had the foresight to bring. He was shivering, and he wrapped it around his shoulders. He chuckled and sat down beside her.

The sky was mostly clear, and the light wasn’t too polluting, so they could see the stars from where they sat. Spots of flickering pink, yellow, and blue against the dark inky night. All very, very far away. Not quite far away enough.

“Can we… see Leo?” Jacobi asked quietly.

She looked at him. He didn’t move his eyes from the sky. She exhaled and looked back up. She could recognise some of the shapes, but not all of the names came back to her. Her space phase had been a long time ago.

Ha. That was a funny thing for an astronaut to say. “Nah. Leo’s a spring constellation,” she answered.

Jacobi looked at his feet, and then lay backwards in the sand. There wasn’t much light to throw a shadow, but Jacobi was in Lovelace’s, obscuring his face.

She thought about Leo. The next time she would be able to see Wolf 359, it would have been a little more than seven years since her first day on the Hephaestus.

Seven point seven nine five light years. The light that she’d see from Wolf 359 on Earth would be 7.795 years old. She’d be seeing it before she was there. Before Fisher was. Before Hui, and Fourier, and Lambert. And Selberg. Maybe even before Rhea was there.

For the next eight years, she could watch it happen all over again. She could watch her crew die. She could watch herself die. She could watch herself come back. Maybe she would even be able to see the star turn blue.

Her breaths shuddered, and the ache in her chest grew like creeping ivy. Tears rolled out down her cheeks, despite her efforts. She closed her eyes and bit on her lip, trying to quash the hurt that was threatening to burst out of her. She could get a handle on it.

Choked, muffled sobs drifted into her ears. Jacobi had his hand over his mouth, breathing deep through his nose. Lovelace could see his eyes glistening in the dark as he stared straight upwards into the sky.

She tried to ignore it, leave him to his own grief, but every hiccup of his made it harder to contain the clawing, scratching mess of rage and devastation that was tearing up her insides.

She lay back on the sand beside him and slipped her hand into his, blowing a long, almost steady breath into the air above them. She lay back on the sand beside him and slipped her hand into his. He held tight with a hand that was tough from blisters over blisters, similar to her own. More tears shivered out of her and wormed their way into the sand.

They cried. She let all of those feelings spill out into the dark, and he did too. At some point, one of them – neither could be sure which, maybe both at the same time – reached out their free arm and they wrapped around each other in a hug. They pressed their hands into each others’ backs and pressed their faces into each others’ necks until they were squeezed dry of emotions. They were left lying in the sand, listening to the ebbing of the ocean shushing them gently while they breathed.

“Do you wanna get blackout drunk?” she sniffed.

“Oh, more than anything.”


	5. Adjustment Period

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to tumblr user @frith-in-thorns for inspiring Hera's part of this chapter!

“Okay,” Dominik said. He passed the popcorn to Renée while he got onto the sofa. “Are we all set?”

“We’re set,” Doug replied, as if he were about to start a race. His intensity was only amplified by the three blankets he had bundled himself up in.

“Can you see us, Hera?” Renée asked, tilting the laptop slightly. They’d tried several arrangements before they decided that their least complicated option was for Hera to have a feed into the TV on her own, and have the laptop webcam pointed at the audience. For posterity and whatnot.

“Yep, looks good. Ready to go?”

“Oh hey, Kat texted. She got home safe,” Dominik interjected, looking at his phone.

“I hope Lovelace got wherever she was going,” Renée said. They hadn’t had a text from either of the departed crewmates, although she hadn’t expected one. When Lovelace said she was going on vacation, she was going on vacation.

“I hope Jacobi doesn’t join a circus or something,” Doug mused, as if it were a legitimate concern. You really didn’t know what to expect from a guy like Jacobi.

“Sorry, movie,” Dominik reminded them, and he locked his phone. “Are we ready?”

“We’re ready,” Renée said. T-minus 3. 2. 1. Launch.

‘I Got You Babe’ blared from Bill Murray’s radio for the first time of many. The movie was in the back of her mind as Renée looked at Doug, attention rapt. He was taking in every frame on the screen, taking in as much of it as he possibly could to start filling the empty shelves of his bank of pop culture.

She couldn’t help feeling that this was right. There was something about this movie on this night with this flavour of popcorn that just felt like it had aligned perfectly into position.

Dominik squeezed her arm. She met his eyes, and saw his gentle smile. ‘Don’t forget to enjoy this for yourself,’ he was saying.

She’d worried, a little (a lot), that they wouldn’t click like they used to when she got back. That’d she’d have shifted, or he would have, and they wouldn’t be able to do that thing where they had a whole conversation with their eyes.

But he still noticed when she got too caught up in everyone else to enjoy something for herself. And she could still read his eyes when he said it with a look.

She rested her head on his shoulder and squeezed back. She reached for a handful of popcorn and felt how it melted on her tongue just right.

\---

“Eiffel!” Renée gasped awake. Her head spun for a moment, unused to the gravity, and then she felt as if she had been suddenly dropped into her mattress.

She rubbed her eyes as they adjusted, heard the intermittent _whoosh_ of traffic out the window and, much closer, the steady breathing of her husband beside her. She closed her eyes and took the bedroom air into her lungs. She didn’t know when she had stopped noticing the taste of metal in the air on the Hephaestus.

“Hera,” she whispered. Dominik didn’t stir at the noise; he tended to sleep heavy, and the last couple of days had been exhausting for all of them.

Her phone lit up by the bed. A message from the “SmartHouse” read: _Yeah?_

Renée realised, then, that she didn’t have anything to say. She wrestled with her feelings, coming at the loneliness crushing her chest with a Spear of Logic. She was about the furthest from alone she could be. Her husband was right beside her, her best friends were in the next room over and lighting up her phone screen respectively.

_Are you okay?_

“Yeah,” she breathed. “Yeah, I just… I’m glad to have you here, Hera.”

There was a small pause. Then, from her headphones she heard a little tinny voice, familiar: “I’m glad to be here, Renée.”

It was still weird. It was all… still so weird.

She carefully untangled herself from the sheets and treaded softly towards the door. What was she doing? This was dumb. She should go back to bed.

She didn’t.

The door to the guest room was a little bit ajar. None of the Minkowski paranoia, she supposed. She could remember where the door creaked without even thinking about it, and stopped pushing it just short of that spot.

She looked at Doug, with his face pressed into the pillow, splayed on his belly. Exactly how she would have imagined he slept in gravity, before she’d known for sure. His nose twitched, but he was otherwise still, melting into the soft sheets like he was made for them.

She hated that she was jealous of him. She hated, hated it. As if she wanted him to be muttering and tossing and gasping awake in the dark. As if she wanted him to be stuck with all the nightmares and the loneliness and the guilt. She didn’t. She was so, so glad that he had escaped.

But all she could think was that if he had remembered it all, he would be awake to speak to her right now.

On his thirty-second birthday, when they were alone, and exhausted, and confused, and at a loss for a plan, they’d pulled an all-nighter. They would regret it later, when things started falling apart and they couldn’t even get a nap in before the next disaster. But on that night, it had seemed imperative that they stay awake.

That they stay together.

“How does a birthday dinner sound, Eiffel?” she’d asked.

“Sounds like music to my goddamn ears,” he replied. She groaned, he laughed. It was an accident, he swore.

She’d cobbled together a birthday meal from the half-finished Christmas dinner and the very last of the freeze-dried ice cream – she’d long ago hidden it from Eiffel when she caught on to his pantry-raiding tendencies.

They hadn’t wanted to sit in the mess hall. It had seemed too empty, although they were only minus one body, and one hardly ever ate with them at that. Even so, the whole station felt empty, and even vaster, so they went to the only place that wasn’t haunted by ghosts; the sleeping quarters.

He’d said they would make it like a sleepover. Stay up all night gossiping and trading secrets and painting each others’ nails – not that either of them had any nail polish with them.

Eiffel had told stories. Wild tales she had only half-believed, and she wished she could remember.

She’d been so glad to have him there that night. Just being goofy, brilliant Eiffel, clearly scared out of his mind but cracking jokes about it regardless. And for some crazy reason, he really believed she could get them through this. She had felt like things might just turn out okay, as long as he was there with her.

But now he was gone, or mostly-gone, or maybe just different. So what happened now?

She toed back to her room and closed the door as quietly as she could.

“Renée?” came a whisper behind her.

She spun like a startled animal, and felt guilt wash over her. What did this look like, her sneaking out to spy on Eiffel while he slept? Heat rushed to her cheeks, and her toes felt the chill of the floor under them.

Dominik’s face was filled with… relief.

She didn’t understand. The expression dissolved away as he reached out to her, transforming into something tender and understanding. She thought that she might have imagined the relief, for a moment.

“I thought I… might have imagined you. For a second there,” he was sheepish, as if the thought was silly. The words were barely there, blending into the ambient noise of the house.

She sat down beside him and closed her eyes with air venting out of her mouth. Stupid. Self-absorbed. Inconsiderate.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. The words caught on the air, seeming louder than they should’ve, and she winced. She could imagine him reaching out into the dark for someone who he thought he finally had back – only to realise she wasn’t there.

He shook his head, “It’s okay. We’re… both gonna need time. That’s okay.”

She shuffled back into her spot on the bed and lay down. She let Dominik nestle into her side, felt the warmth of his skin on hers. She had missed this. She had missed the absolute hell out of this.

“You and Doug,” he said, “were you something?”

It was an innocent question. She could even see why he’d ask it, but her response was an immediate and sure, “No. No, it wasn’t like that.” Doug was her charge. He was her best friend. He was family. But he wasn’t anything else.

“’Kay,” he said. There was a quiet pause, but she could tell he was going to ask more. “Anyone?”

It was a much more open ended question. If he’d been more direct, she might have answered quicker, but there was something about the question that requested transparency, and a straightforward answer couldn’t really do that.

“I…” she didn’t know how to start. He was patient; Always. “There was almost… something. With Lovelace,” she said finally.

He hummed, thinking about this. “Why wasn’t there?”

She didn’t have an answer for that. She could remember Lovelace’s hand on hers, the firm determination in her eyes. The way she spoke with absolute and unwavering confidence that they were going to get home. She could remember the way her breath felt brushing against her lips. The sting of something _almost there._

Once it was obvious she wasn’t going to say anything, he said, “Maybe there could be something now?”

Renée said, “Maybe.”

In a different time, and a different place, maybe. But they were thrown into one hell of a situation together, and she doubted if Lovelace was keen to pursue that particular avenue when she had plenty of other options. A lot of bad memories. A lot of complicated feelings.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Mm. Dated a few people. Nothing too serious,” he replied. “No one right now.”

She let her thoughts swim around above her head. Old memories and new memories and future memories and all the things she didn’t want to think about just yet, floating around above her.

The rubber-band ball of anxiety she’d set aside came tumbling into her brain. She picked it apart, reconciling it with the reality. Dominik didn’t think her return was an elaborate prank. He wasn’t angry at her. He wasn’t apathetic. She still knew how to talk to him without words.

“You’re too nice, Dominik,” Renée said. Not for the first time.

He hummed happily. Not for the last.

\---

When Doug flicked on the light switch in the hallway, he thought he was hallucinating.

He did it again. And a third time.

“Uhh… Hera?” he asked.

His phone beeped in his hand. “What is it, Doug?” she asked.

“What… what’s that noise?”

“What noise?”

He flicked the light switch to demonstrate. A sound like Windows popup would make sounded again. Where the hell was it even coming from?

“Oh, that. Uhh, don’t worry. It’s nothing. I’m. Working on it,” she assured, not completely convincingly.

He walked into the kitchen, and stood in front of the cupboards. Practically, he should just start opening them to try and find the cereal, but he really wanted to get it right first try. His brain was virtually empty, so he had plenty of room for learning all these new things. How couldn’t he retain a basic fact like where the cereal was kept? It was a matter of pride.

He reached his free hand out and withdrew it a number of times before he chose the second eye-level cupboard from the left. Mugs. Dammit. Resolve broken, he started opening the doors at random until he found the box of Frosted Flakes he was looking for.

Bowls. Come on, he had _just_ seen bowls. He was such an idiot. He opened a cupboard…

Mugs again. _Seriously, Doug?_

He shook his head to himself as he poured the cereal into the bowl. “I think I at least remember where the milk is,” he rolled his eyes and took his bowl towards the fridge.

There was an odd, loud chime that made him pause, followed by a sudden blast of amelodic sound that jerked his hand and send Frosted Flakes raining around the kitchen.

“Are you looking for somewhere to spend a relaxing weekend away?” demanded a chipper, rehearsed voice over the Bluetooth speaker that was tucked at the back of the dresser.

“Jeez, what the hell, Hera?” he asked. He looked at the aftermath forlornly as Renée appeared in the doorway.

“What the..” she frowned at the mess, and the still-blaring speaker. “Hera?”

The ad cut short abruptly. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” her voice came through on the speaker. “I’m—I’m working on it.”

“What happened?” she questioned. Doug recognised it as her Commander Voice, which she seemed to scarcely have used in his memory. He was sure this was a recent development.

“It’s just a slight—,i>bug,” Hera replied. She said it like she was wrestling with something, something a little more challenging than a bug.

“Does this have something to do with why the door keeps re-locking itself every time I try to open it?” Renée frowned.

“Do you have a virus?” Doug asked, still lost amid a minefield of Frosted Flakes. Renée seemed to finally be processing that aspect of the situation and was looking like she would rather go back to bed.

“It’s not ,i>my fault,” Hera insisted. “Stupid internet—It’s big and loud and annoying, and apparently has it out for me.”

“What did you click on?” Renée asked. The Command was slipping from her voice, giving way to the start of a smile. “Do we have to have a discussion about safe browsing?”

“Shut up,” she responded.

Doug heard Dominik’s feet on the floor, and he joined Renée’s side, rubbing his eyes. “Much as I appreciate the impromptu dance party coming from my alarm clock…” he said, “I don’t. I hate it.”

“Screw you guys,” Hera said. She paused, and then rectified, “ _Fuck_ you.”

Everyone in the room cheered, and then dissolved into laughter. Doug high-fived himself, since Hera didn't have any hands. She had been working on dissolving her profanity filter since the previous night.

“Oh, I _so_ wish I had been able to do this before,” she sighed. The speaker chimed as another ad popped up, and she cut it off with a garbled, “Shut up, you stupid piece of sh—“

Dominik laughed. “Take your time.” As Hera got the speaker under control, he said, “Hey, Doug I was thinking. When you—“ he faltered as he saw the chaos on the kitchen floor, but then brushed it off, “—When you’re awake enough, we should go into town and go shopping for you. Clothes and stuff. Sound good?”

“Uh, yeah,” he was caught a little off guard. He barely knew Dominik, but here he was offering to take him shopping. “Sure, that sounds good.”

“Cool,” he smiled, and turned to go back to his bedroom. “Good luck with your stupid piece of shit, Hera.”

“Thank you,” she replied, sounding like she was physically restraining the thing from busting through the speaker once again.

Looking at the mess on the kitchen floor, Doug suddenly gasped in a eureka moment. Renée’s answer was the usual one; a highly concerned ‘oh no’ face.

“We should get a Roomba.”


End file.
